Trump prioritizes personal loyalty and hardliners in his first appointments

Donald Trump is beginning to shape his team. With his first appointments — and his discarded options — the president-elect is signalling that personal loyalty is a necessary condition for being part of the new U.S. administration. He began by appointing Susie Wiles, the discreet director of his presidential campaign, as his future chief of staff, a kind of shadow president. After that, he selected Tom Homan as his “border czar;” Homan is a veteran immigration official who already applied Trump’s immigration policies with a heavy hand during the latter’s first term. Stephen Miller, another anti-immigration hawk, will be deputy chief of staff at the White House. In addition, Trump has already settled on the top members of his foreign policy team. Senator Marco Rubio is expected to be secretary of state, which will make him the first Latino to head American diplomacy. He has also chosen Elise Stefanik, who considers the United Nations an “anti-Semitic institution,” to be his ambassador to the UN, and offered Mike Waltz the post of national security adviser.

The appointments also include Lee Zeldin, who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory in 2020; he will lead the environmental agency with the mission of eliminating regulations.

Curiously, before announcing the appointments, the first thing Trump did was to say that he was not counting on Nikki Haley, who was his first ambassador to the UN and, more recently, his rival in the Republican primaries, nor on Mike Pompeo, whom he appointed as secretary of state in his first term. This was interpreted as a warning that those who have criticized him in the past will have no place at his table.

Those chosen to stand with Trump have demonstrated their loyalty over the years. Some joined in the hoax that the 2020 election was stolen, others defended him in the impeachment process for his role in the assault on the Capitol. Others marched to support him when he was on trial in New York for the hush money case.

With his first appointments, Trump has filled prominent positions in two of his priority areas: immigration and foreign policy. What he has not yet outlined, or has not been revealed, is his economic team.

Foreign policy

Rubio, 53, was elected as a senator in 2010, becoming the first son of Cuban immigrants to serve in the Senate, where he has stood out as a foreign policy hawk, taking tough stances on China and Iran in particular. He has also supported sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. He is additionally a staunch defender of Israel.

Rubio faced Trump in the 2016 primaries, but they later made peace. His name was mentioned among the possible vice presidential candidates, and he has campaigned alongside Trump in the presidential election race.

Although he was initially a leading supporter of Ukraine, he voted against legislation last year that allocated some $61 billion in aid to the country, saying he rejected the measure because he did not believe it addressed immigration concerns.

“I’m not on Russia’s side, but unfortunately the reality of it is that the way the war in Ukraine is going to end is with a negotiated settlement,” Rubio said in an interview in late September on NBC’s Meet the Press. “We hope that when that time comes, there is more leverage on the Ukrainian side than on the Russian side. That really is the goal here, in my mind. And I think that’s what Donald Trump is trying to say.”

Stefanik, 40, has remained loyal to Trump, and was his ally in the impeachment process against the former president for his role in the assault on the Capitol. She replaced Liz Cheney as the fourth-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, which she joined in 2014 as the youngest congresswoman in the history of the United States.

The New York native embraced Trump and Republican conspiracy theories. Last term, Stefanik became the scourge of female university presidents, accusing them of anti-Semitism during the Gaza war protests. Her line of questioning a year ago in the House Committee on Education and the Workforce ended up costing the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay their seats. The congresswoman has portrayed herself as a staunch defender of Israel. However, she has little experience in foreign policy and national security. “Elise is an incredibly strong, tough, and smart America First fighter,” Trump said in a statement on Monday announcing his choice.

Mike Waltz sits on the House China Task Force, which coordinates policy on how the United States should compete with the Asian superpower. He is one of the most hawkish congressmen on China, and called for the U.S. to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing over its involvement in the origin of Covid and its mistreatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority.

He has been highly critical of aid to Ukraine. “The era of Ukraine’s blank check from Congress is over,” he wrote in an article for Fox News. “Stopping Russia before it draws NATO and therefore the U.S. into war is the right thing to do. But the burden cannot continue to be solely on the shoulders of the American people, especially while Western Europe gets a pass.”

Immigration

Trump also announced on Sunday night via his social media site, Truth Social, that he had appointed Tom Homan as the new “border czar,” as he called him. Homan was already in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s first term and has remained loyal to him. He campaigned for Trump in the primaries and also spoke at the Republican National Convention in July in Milwaukee. “I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden’s released in our country. You better start packing now,” he said.

Homan will be responsible not only for fighting illegal immigration, but also for handling the mass deportation of immigrants, one of the president-elect’s signature campaign promises. “I am pleased to announce that the Former ICE Director, and stalwart on Border Control, Tom Homan, will be joining the Trump Administration, in charge of our Nation’s Borders,” Trump wrote.

Homan collaborated on Project 2025, the conservatives’ flagship program that Trump distanced himself from during his campaign. In the Republican’s first presidency, Homan embodied the government’s hardline policy against immigration. He defended mass deportations in a recent interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes program. “I hear a lot of people say, you know, the talk of a mass deportation is racist. [That] it’s threatening to the immigrant community. It’s not threatening to the immigrant community. It should be threatening to the illegal immigrant community. But on the heels of [a] historic illegal immigration crisis. That has to be done,” he said.

“It’s not gonna be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not gonna be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous,” he said in that interview. “They’ll be targeted arrests. We’ll know who we’re going to arrest, where we’re most likely to find ‘em based on numerous investigative processes.” He said he favored workplace raids, intended to prevent undocumented workers from competing with U.S. citizens and to combat human trafficking. He also said it’s possible to carry out such deportations without separating children from their families. “Families can be deported together,” he said.

Homan’s appointment is joined by that of Stephen Miller, another immigration hawk, as deputy chief of staff for policy. The appointment was announced by CNN. “This is another fantastic pick by the president. Congrats Stephen M,” tweeted vice president-elect J. D. Vance. Miller was a senior adviser in Trump’s first term and one of the driving forces behind his measure to separate thousands of immigrant families as a deterrent program in 2018.

The first measures

Trump wants to have a battery of executive orders ready to approve on the day of his inauguration, the day he once said he would act like a “dictator” to “close the border,” meaning to illegal immigration, and to “drill, drill, drill,” that is, to relax regulations for oil extraction. Asked this Sunday on Fox News how many executive orders could be expected in the first week, Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, answered: “There will be dozens of them. I can assure you of that.”

There are matters that can be regulated by decree, but others are reserved for Congress. Often, the red line ends up being drawn by the courts. It is assumed that among those measures on the first day there will be some dealing with immigration. Trump wants to reinstate his Remain in Mexico policy, under which asylum seekers have to remain on the other side of the border while their applications are being processed. He also wants to eliminate automatic citizenship for babies born in the United States to undocumented immigrants, although it is not clear that he has the power to do so by executive order.

Imposing tariffs, at least temporarily, is also within the president’s powers if he claims national security is at stake. Although the president-elect has said that tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary and it is taken for granted that he will impose them across the board, he has put less emphasis on doing so on day one. He did say that he would impose a 25% tax on all imports from Mexico “immediately” if Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, does not stop the flow of immigrants and drug trafficking.

Trump’s priorities include firing Special Counsel Jack Smith (“in two seconds,” he said), who managed to get him charged with dozens of crimes for illegally retaining classified documents containing secrets about the United States’ defense and for attempts to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden. In addition, he can approve clemency measures for all the people who were prosecuted for the assault on the Capitol, whom he has called “hostages,” “political prisoners” and “patriots” and whom he promised to help on the first day in office. “I am inclined to pardon many of them. I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control,” he said in May in an interview on CNN.

According to the media, Trump has already prepared a draft decree to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, the international treaty sponsored by the United Nations to combat climate change. The new president can by decree eliminate environmental protections, stop wind projects and eliminate incentives for green energy and bet on “drilling, drilling, drilling” in search of oil and gas. The announcement of the appointment of Lee Zeldin, another of his faithful followers, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) already expressly indicates that his mission is to eliminate regulations that hinder the operation of companies.

The president-elect has also campaigned against trans rights protections, a battleground of the culture war. When current President Joe Biden announced measures to prevent discrimination against them, Trump retorted in May: “We’re going to end it on Day 1.” “Don’t forget, that was done as an order from the president. That came down as an executive order. And we’re going to change it. On Day 1 it’s going to be changed.”

Trump also said that the “first thing” he would do upon taking office would be to exempt tips from taxes for hospitality workers. That, in reality, is up to Congress.

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